Fixing Google Merchant Center Brand Issues with Supplemental Feeds

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If you’re running a Squarespace e-commerce site and selling branded products (like trading cards, collectibles, or any resold goods), you’ve probably hit a frustrating wall: Squarespace automatically sets the brand attribute in Google Merchant Center to your site name. For my Topaz Cards store, this meant all Pokémon products showed “Topaz Cards” as the brand instead of “Pokemon” or “Bandai”, which contributed to GMC compliance issues.

The problem? Google’s brand attribute policy requires the actual manufacturer or brand owner for products with clearly associated brands. Setting your store name when you’re a reseller violates their misrepresentation policy.

The Solution: Supplemental Feeds

Supplemental feeds let you override specific attributes from your primary feed without touching the Squarespace integration. Here’s how to set one up.

Step 1: Enable Advanced Data Source Management

This is the gotcha that most tutorials don’t mention. In GMC Next, supplemental feeds aren’t available by default.

  1. Go to Settings → Add-ons
  2. Enable "Advanced data source management"

Without this, you won’t see the supplemental feed options at all.

Step 2: Create Your Google Sheet

Create a new Google Sheet with two columns:

  • id - The product ID from GMC (not your Squarespace SKU)
  • brand - The correct brand name

Critical: Squarespace auto-generates product IDs that look like eefaf1c9-f10a-4151-b666-4cb1f92ef6ea. These are what you need in the id column. You can find them by clicking on any product in GMC and looking at the “Product ID” field.

Example sheet:

id                                      brand
eefaf1c9-f10a-4151-b666-4cb1f92ef6ea   Pokemon
ea376288-738d-45d5-bce9-81c8e7cc5eb1   Wizards of the Coast
a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890   Bandai

Step 3: Add the Supplemental Feed

  1. In GMC, go to Data sources → Supplemental sources (this section only appears after enabling the add-on)
  2. Click Add supplemental source → Google Sheets
  3. Connect your Google account and select your sheet
  4. Link it to your primary Squarespace feed

The feed processes every few hours. Check a few products after processing to verify the brands updated correctly.

Additional Resources

For a complete reference of all GMC product attributes, including GTIN, see Google’s product data specification.

This post documents a solution for Topaz Cards, where I sell Pokémon and trading card game products. If you’re dealing with similar e-commerce platform limitations, hopefully this saves you some time.

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